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The health of literary giant Gabriel Garcia Marquez is stable but "very fragile," his family said in a statement this week.

At 87 years old, his age means "there are risks of complications," the family said.

The Colombian author has been recovering at his Mexico City home since April 8, after being hospitalized for nine days for infections in his lungs and his urinary tract.

"He is and will continue to recover at his home," the family said.

Garcia Marquez's wife, Mercedes Barcha, and his sons Rodrigo and Gonzalo, thanked the public for its outpouring of support, and asked for privacy.

The Nobel Prize recipient, known as "Gabo," was born in the northern Colombian town of Aracataca, the inspiration for the fictional town of Macondo, the setting of the 1967 novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude."

He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982 "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts," according to the Nobel Prize website.